As dusk spread over the island, the masked visitors made their way up a snow-covered path to a house overlooking the river.
Once inside, each was made to perform a jig. Wearing wigs and hats over fantastic masks, their bodies transformed with pillows under heavy coats, they danced tentatively at first — to hide their footwork and their identity.
“Let loose!” cried the homeowner, Cyrille Dufour, playing the spoons while others joined him on guitars and button accordions. “Let loose!”
The dancers had no choice but to show off their best, telltale moves. “Do we know who it is?” Mr. Dufour said, as the others guessed — correctly, most of the time — the identity of each person in disguise.
The islanders were taking part in an annual masked celebration called Mid-Lent, or “Mi-Carême” in French, visiting houses, bars and community centers with the goal of not being recognized. A tradition rooted in medieval France, it survives today in a handful of French-speaking corners of Canada. They include a few small islands in the middle of the St. Lawrence River, like L’Isle-aux-Coudres in Quebec, which is accessible from the mainland only by ferry.
Back when Roman Catholic French Québécois were expected to do penance during the 40 days of Lent, they took a break halfway through by engaging in masquerade, dance and mischief for a few days, despite the disapproval of local priests.
Today, even as few observe Lent on the island of 1,100 people, Mid-Lent is celebrated as part of its culture and by some as an act of defiance against the once all-powerful Church in Quebec.
“Mid-Lent is like punk rock — it was against the established order,” said Nicolas Harvey, 39, a high school history teacher who welcomed masked revelers to his home and later went to a local bar in disguise. “We still do it because it’s really cool that our grandparents did it. Today, we don’t have to observe Lent, but they had to, and so Mid-Lent was a form of resistance.”
On the morning of the masked celebration, freshly fallen snow lay undisturbed on the island’s villages, near two Catholic churches, roadside chapels and, farther out, a large granite statue of the Virgin Mary surrounded by slabs of river ice on the island’s easternmost tip.
Near the ferry dock, snow was falling against a large black cross marked with the date Sept. 7, 1535 — the first time Mass was celebrated on the island. The day before, the French navigator, Jacques Cartier, had landed on the island as he went up the St. Lawrence River during his second journey to Canada.
The Catholic Church long held a grip on Quebec society, controlling its schools, hospitals and other services. French-speaking families tended to be poorly educated and very large, as the church taught that having many children was a moral duty. Moving away from the church was a major part of the birth of modern Quebec, which began with the social transformation known as the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s.
The church’s hold was stronger in rural areas, and perhaps even more so on little islands that bad weather regularly cut off from the rest of the world, especially in winter during Lent.
In the past, islanders never dared question the strict observance of Lent: fasting, renouncing chocolate and other desserts, praying and repenting, some recalled.
“Every morning, we’d wake up early to go to Mass at 7 a.m.,” Léandre Dufour, 85, said in an interview inside the 140-year-old Saint-Louis Church, where he is a lay leader. “We’d have to walk three, four kilometers each way.”
And so the festivities of Mid-Lent flourished precisely in communities where life during Lent was the most austere, said Serge Gauthier, a historian and president of the Historical Society of Charlevoix, a region that includes the island. It was also why the custom survived far longer in Quebec than in France, where the power of the Catholic Church declined with the French Revolution in 1789, Mr. Gauthier said.
In small villages in Quebec, local priests discouraged people from participating in Mid-Lent, sometimes aggressively.
“Some priests even chased Mid-Lent revelers with their brooms,” Mr. Gauthier said.
On L’Isle-aux-Coudres, where the economy used to revolve around hunting belugas and farming, a priest in a 1962 documentary on the island, “For Those Who Will Follow,” exhorted islanders to behave during Mid-Lent.
“In the parish, Mid-Lent will be permitted in the sense that it will be tolerated,” the priest says, telling his parishioners to stay away from alcohol during the celebration and to show respect toward women.
When Hélène Bergeron, 75, was a child, islanders sculpted molds for masks in the woods and made them out of papier-mâché. Back then, only men visited houses in disguise.
“The idea was for young men to visit girls and to flirt a little,” Ms. Bergeron said. “The girls weren’t allowed to participate, they just stayed home and watched.”
“It was like that back then — women didn’t have the right to do much, not even sign checks,” added Ms. Bergeron, a retired schoolteacher who also became the first woman to call step dances on the island.
In a small community where nearly everyone could recognize one another by their way of walking, the few minutes a masked reveler went unrecognized represented fleeting moments of freedom.
“You left yourself to become another person,” said Michel Perron, 74.
As the islanders and others across Quebec began drifting away from the church in the 1960s, Mid-Lent celebrations also declined. Today, no priests live on the island. With few French Québécois choosing the priesthood, the island’s two parishes, like others in Quebec, depend on priests from Africa, Haiti and other developing parts of the world.
“In the past, Lent was very hard because people made many sacrifices and so they needed a pause to relax,” said the Rev. Joël Depré, a Haitian priest who has served in Quebec since 2011 and took the ferry to celebrate Mass on the island on the Fourth Sunday of Lent.
But he viewed Mid-Lent as a purely cultural event because “nowadays few people observe Lent.”
Even as Mid-Lent lost its religious significance, some islanders in recent years pushed for a revival of the masked celebrations. Mr. Harvey, the high school teacher, explained Mid-Lent’s history to his students and taught them how to make masks. The key, then as now, was to identify masked revelers by their personal style of jigging.
In one house, members of the extended Harvey family put on their disguises before setting off to visit homes. Patrice Harvey, 66, turned himself into a drunken man with a toilet seat around his neck. Laurence Harvey, 27, used hockey shoulder pads and a cushion to transform herself into a lumberjack.
“Last year, people recognized me right away because I wasn’t well-padded and I didn’t change my walk,” Ms. Harvey said. “I was disguised as an old woman, but even before I could do a jig, someone from my street said, ‘I think that’s Laurence.”
As in previous years, the most successfully disguised was William Dufour, 59, who wore a long green and white dress, a silky wig and a golden mask under a floppy hat. Relatives and friends alike failed to unmask him.
“People look at your dance steps,” Mr. Dufour said. “But if you change them from one year to the next, you can fool people.”
After visiting private homes and a senior center, many Mid-Lent revelers gathered at a bar called La Fascine. Ms. Bergeron was the evening’s step dance caller. Mr. Harvey, the high school teacher, had just been unmasked after a jig.
“Mid-Lent belongs to us,” he said. “The world is falling apart, but we’re having fun tonight.”
Norimitsu Onishi reports on life, society and culture in Canada. He is based in Montreal.
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